The ability to recognize the Visual Focus of Attention (VFOA, i.e. what or whom a person is looking at) of people is important for robots or conversational agents interacting with multiple people, since it plays a key role in turn-taking, engagement or intention monitoring. As eye gaze estimation is often impossible to achieve, most systems currently rely on head pose as an approximation, creat...

Online communication channels, especially social web platforms, are rapidly replacing traditional ones. Online platforms allow users to overcome physical barriers, enabling worldwide participation. However, the power of online communication bears an important negative consequence — we are exposed to too much information to process. Too many participants, for example, can turn online public spac...

This study presents synthetic embodied conversational agents, and how they can be used to explore the persuasive potential of real embodied conversational agents. Utilizing a novel Wizard-of-Oz style approach and a direct measure of behavior change we explore whether ‘ideal’ embodied conversational agents have a similar persuasive impact as real people, and demonstrate the importance of visuall...

In this paper we use Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate conversational humor in talkin-interaction. We attempt to better understand how the latter is produced and co-constructed by participants in accounting for the devices used by participants in their sequential environment. The framework of CA enables us to take into account the various means available to speakers to communicate, orie...

Currently, applications that focus on providing conversations with virtual humans require extensive work to create robust conversational models. We present a new approach called Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling. Using this approach, users create conversational models in a distributed manner. To do this, end-users interact with virtual humans to provide new stimuli (questions a...

We assessed the effects of video modeling on acquisition and generalization of conversational skills among autistic children. Three autistic boys observed videotaped conversations consisting of two people discussing specific toys. When criterion for learning was met, generalization of conversational skills was assessed with untrained topics of conversation; new stimuli (toys); unfamiliar person...